Re-Thinking, Re-Focusing and Re-Energising how we Lead Innovation and Manage Design

In February, 2001 I presented at Daratech 2001 Conference, in the Boston Park Plaza Hotel,about the interaction of Design Processes and Technologies for packaging design in a global company. I was amused to find the hotel had been built with a large exhibition/ conference hall and nearby special rooms where sales executives could not only sleep but present their wares to prospective clients and customers. The successful ones would see their products being widely adopted; the less successful would rethink their approach, positioning or even their product itself in varying degrees of desperation!

I drew on the Everett Rogers theories of Innovation Diffusion, adapted it to reflect my own experiences of choosing, using and exploiting design technologies -also described here.

The S curve above illustrates my experience of how a new design technology is adopted bearing in mind the complexities of innovation at the intersection of business,technology and organisational culture. Someone will spot an emerging technology... in an article, presentation or over a beer at a conference... and will begin to talk about it in the office. The reception maybe frosty or lukewarm, but in an innovative group this will be interpreted as "I haven't got my story engaging enough to hold their attention yet." ( I know the theories say you should suspend judgement, never criticise, etc. but as we are mainly human it is better to be able to live with the paradox of story development (as a colleague put it when referring to a key report he was writing " After it returns for its thirteenth rewrite the reviewer's positive comments are a bit hard to take!").

So how do we start gaining committment? By playing.. perhaps getting the technology vendor to show you what sort of play can take place. This is almost being at the inflection point illustrated in Technology Trails to Discover. The activity will begin to draw other people in... within the group and, perhaps, within the client groups as well. This can lead to an agreement to use on a real project to tease out the benefits. Often this can be done by using the new technology in parallel to the current, so that the client feels happy that project exposure to risk is minimised.

Successful completion of this activity will create a great story and a great demonstration that can be used to energise the roll out of the technology on all key projects....and then on to the next technology!

This diagram, from my Daratech2001 presentation traced the history of Design Technology adoption so:

During the presentation I realised that we could add another line representing the locus of points on the S curves where integrating and growing was proceeding apace so I drew it like this (by the way MIT means Make Ideas Tangible):

What intrigued me was the slow down in the rate of increasing effectiveness on the right of the diagram which must mean there was a slowdown in the cultural response to the options and opportunities presented by the technology. If you look at the bottom (time) scale then it is also apparent that we are moving from individual cultural responses to the group repsonses and then a greater population of the project people... as it turns out there are increasing numbers of individual interdisciplinary, cross-functional, cross-organisational inter-relationships to cope with as we move left to right.

We are addressing the issues of moving minds of individuals to that of groups to that of organisations; analogous the moving from Sarnoff's Law through Metcalfe's to Reed's; pushing out stuff, sharing stuff, facilitating the co-creation of stuff. No wonder things were slowing down.

During this period innovation teams being drawn from functions and organisations, that were geographically dispersed, in order to co-create stuff rather than have it passed on and be tempted to value add (complicatedness approach). Tools that help the facilitation and rapid creativity when the group is together and facilitates the reinforcement of strategic vision and action whilst apart, counteracting strategy and attention decay were in short supply. Much experimentation was going on to try to understand the dynamics of these teams and how emerging technologies cold be deployed by the process facilitators to enable dramatic improvements in innovation quality.

The latest so-called Web 2.0 technologies should enable us to build significant communities that can co-create new things. Lotus Notes was a step along the road; Groove moved into a web-world and brought benefits. MySpace and FaceBook democratised social networking. It is to be hoped that the architecture of FaceBook may point us in the right direction to build significant creative behaviour in a dispersed network, but truly dynamic teams do not spontaneously arise from membership of, say, FaceBook. The social networks that arise in that environment is akin to "going down the pub or club" where you have fleeting social engagement with a large number of people and a better relationship with a few people of like interests (birds of a feather). What we are looking for are tools that will support a dynamic design processing network of disparate people who may not have chosen to be on the project but will be energised to contribute fully to it by sharing a powerful vision of the outcome... more a sort of SpaceBook application. To sum it up we are looking for technologies that enable the innovation project groups to become Dream Teams by quickly showing these observable characteristics

A strong platform of understanding

A shared vision

A creative climate

Ownership of ideas

Resilience to setbacks

Network activation

Learning from experience

Technologies that support these activities are not simple social networking applications, neither are they heavyweight enterprise systems nor are they simple, but they will exhibit simplicity. Simplicity is not the opposite of complexity, but of complicatedness. Simple building blocks can be assembled to address the challenges of complexity; innovation and design are, in fact, complex adaptive systems.... so the last thing we want is complicatedness (is that another name for bureaucracy?).

Kevin Roberts introduced me through his blog to the simplicity of visualising lyrics here

Today organizations are faced with accelerating rates of scientific and technological change, which combine with global media and communication to ensure that fashions, ideas, products and services spread like wildfire.. and like it or not change cannot be turned off. Whilst there is no substitute for business competence, efficiency and cost control, the competitive environment involves businesses in a constant search for differentiation, a way of making themselves unique. That differentiation requires a stream of creative thought and action on many different fronts to produce sustainable advantage; in fact, we need a different approach to leading innovation and managing design.

This picture from TED2006 is a potent metaphor for the task of designing innovation networks in the new millenium. We have touched on the Italian innovation engines of growth previously and talked of how Li & Fung are the global orchestrators of [primarily] clothing development and supply networks. Hopefully we can extract something useful [actionable] from all this!

Firstly what did the accelerating rate of technological change mean for us?

What changes as the rate of technology change accelerates? What happens when I look back three years to see what it was like and then look forward 3 years to the prospect of what is coming.? Doing what I've always done doesn't seem like a reasonable option!

During the 1990's I noticed that my strategic understanding of the spread of new technology necessitated a change in the people I chatted with and shifted the places where I had those conversations -about the possibilities afforded by new design tools and technologies within the context of a regionalising and, later, globalising industry. At the beginning of the decade we were awaiting vendor updates at usergroup meetings usand travelled to the big CAD shows to see what the latest releases were; and what new introductions were being made, often by new companies. We had conversations based on what we understood the friction points were in our design processes and our ambitions for them (oil them, eliminate them, re-arrange them). By the mid-90's we were hosting meetings under non-disclosure agreements to play with the early releases of the latest software and feedback what we thought of it versus where we wanted to go. By the millenium we were visiting the vendor's research teams (and, importantly they visited us) to understand possibilities which we then factored into our technology foresight plan, based on what we thought our strategic needs were as the business evolved. I read something on the underlying trends and paradigm changes (note: there was a lot of talk about business paradigm shifting but this always seemed to be more like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic) that seemed to be taking place around me. The changes in conversations seemed to reflect a change in the "rules" governing the conversations. The "going to the shows" phase seemed to reflect "Sarnoff's Law"- pushing information out increased its value as N, the number of recipients. The conversations about new and upcoming products seemed to reflect a value that increased as N²; i.e. the more conversations the better. But as we actively use social networking tools we can increase the value of those conversation exponentially 2 to the power N. This roughly equates with the three stages of organisational development going on over the same period (about six years) deciding what we should do(strategy) and teling people what their tasks will be; telling people what the strategy is and having one-to-ones to agree their contribution; and lastly getting together and having a strategy discovery session volunteering to do stuff and then doing it, sharing progress and accepting critical comment on the way.

So how do we design the networks to work in this way?

This model was created to enable change conversation to run more smoothly. It showed the need to have a greater awareness of societal megatrends and how these affected social and organisational trends leading to a deeper understanding of "where the world is heading". This foresight understanding will only be useful if it can be translated into insights about the "players", the real people and how their needs and wants will develop in response to the world around them. Couple this with an understanding of existing and future technologies enables a mix of people with wide range of skills, competences and points of view to co-generate creative ideas about products, services and experiences that future people will desire. Future people implies that there is a world for them and so sustainability issues are on the agenda. The generation of these creative ideas and their metamorphosis into concepts "with legs" requires a high degree of networking management to bring people together, expose their knowledge and ideas in a social environment that orchestrates robust interchanges and the creation of new knowledge that moves us forward towards a common goal. This is cosy agreement, the submergence of difference for the common good but healthy debate that allows new stuff to emerge that surprises the participants and leads to winning concepts. Tools that make ideas tangible to ensure a common visualisation are the catalysts of such conversations and the best ones are those that allow known social behaviours to be played out in new ways. The adoption and exploitation of these tools relies on three things: the creation, availability and adaptability of the tools; a cultural climate that allows "messing about" with the tools (and their outputs) and loosely coupled design processes that facilitates "messing about". To be meaningful such "messing about" needs to be externally oriented as well as involving the right people around the right visualisation at the right time. The top picture sums this up with the external world looking in on the team